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Muscle car 2013

We all have our weaknesses, one of mine happens to be muscle cars. Which over my fifty year lifetime has always meant oil-powered carbon-spewing road monsters. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact it cannot remain that way, for a bunch of reasons I’m sure you all know well. So it’s good to see people at least trying:

The two-seat, $135,000 SP:01 has a top speed of 155 miles per hour and can go from zero to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, the same as BMW’s high-performance M5 sedan. Detroit Electric says it will be the world’s fastest pure electric production car. … Its closest competitor, the electric Tesla Model S sedan, goes from zero to 60 in 4.2 seconds and has a top speed of 130 mph.Detroit Electric said the SP:01 can go for an estimated 190 miles between battery charges. A home charging station can fully charge the car in a little more than four hours.

Sadly, I and many others will never be able to afford anything like that. Just buying a decent used car is well out of my reach for now. Decades of wingnuttia have turned sizable swaths of this nation into something resembling a third-world shit-hole, right down to the tiny segment that has made out like bandits while the rest of us suffer. I fear these problems are now so systemic, with enough democrats compromised too, that we will not even begin to solve them in my lifetime, even if the dems regain control of the House.

Comments

Look on the bright side – you can buy a Lotus Exige S for half that price and get nearly identical performance:
0-60 in 3.8 seconds, top speed of 170mph AND get 28mpg if you drive at normal speeds. (37mpg for non-urban driving). If you buy the Roadster version they limit your top speed to 145mph though ;-)

The good news about (expensive) things like this is that it pushes the envelope a little and really tests the edges of the technology, in terms of designing, building, and producing electric vehicles. So, while not everyone can afford one of these, it should push down the price of the average consumer targeted electric vehicle that only goes 0 to 60 in 10 seconds, tops out at 90 mph or so, and gets 450 miles on the same battery charge.

Having said that, I’m more of a two wheel fan (and I can even afford to race them, which is not a cheap hobby). I have gotten pretty excited that the Isle of Mann TT has included an electric only competition for the last couple years, and it looks like some of the world competitors for motorcycle racing might add a new category for electric racing in the next few years as well.

Again, this tech isn’t for everyone, but the constraints of motorcycle design make the miniaturization of the existing tech better and cheaper as it gets developed.

i share your car angst, but in the 70s learned about motorcycles. for $3000, you can buy a nice used vehicle that runs 10s in the quarter, tops out over 150, and gets 45+mpg. .better wheelies than an SP:01 too.

The true salient feature of the mid-sixties muscle cars wasn’t their performance (which wasn’t that great except on the dragstrip) but their amazing bang-per-buck ratio. Never have so many covered the standing-start quarter mile so quickly for so little. We are about to enter a Golden Age of high-performance electric cars. It will last until the politicians see a dip in fuel-tax revenues and demand their piece of the action. Unless, of course, the True Rulers Of the Western World, the insurance cartel, stomp in first.

Reckon the best way to improve engines and more for renewable energy powered cars would be to make them compulsory in F1 and other motorsports. Amazing how the compeditive urge and genius there gets applied so speedily.

Decades of wingnuttia have turned sizable swaths of this nation into something resembling a third-world shit-hole, right down to the tiny segment that has made out like bandits while the rest of us suffer.

Sadly, I and many others will never be able to afford anything like that.
Bad for you. I could but I don’t want to. Not because I don’t find e-cars cool but because they’re simply not good enough yet for every-day-use…

My current everyday-hatchback has a range of .. I think, about 400 Miles and I couldn’t see a single reason why I would spend more money on getting less action..

I’m waiting for the day when e-cars will be really cool – with a range that exceeds the one of most petrol cars by several hundred percent.. I hope that day will be very very soon.

On what percentage of days do you actually drive any significant fraction of that 400 mi range? I couldn’t live with (only) a pure e-car, either — there are a number of days every year when I really need to drive more than even the 200 mi range the Tesla Model S claims — but if I had a Volt, I would almost never burn any gas at all from Monday through Friday… which wouldn’t suck.